Research Catalogue

The PD Arts + Creative Symposium takes place at LocHal in Tilburg (NL) on 20 June 2025.

Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

This exposition emerged from my participation in the second interval of the Simultaneous Arrivals (Simularr) Artistic Research Project—a research project inviting international artist-researchers to explore relational, situated, and process-based inquiries in dialogue with core researchers. Core researchers: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, Franziska Hederer, and Daniele Pozzi. For the second interval, the visual artist and researcher Elena Radaelli and I were invited as visiting artist-researchers. (More information on Simultaneous Arrivals: https://simularr.net/about/) The exposition presents my process during the residency, i.e. my Traces and Paths Towards a Singularly-Plural Companionships. The eight-week residency (3 March-30 April 2024) took place across three sites: Graz (Austria); Lecce, San Cesario (Italy); and Klagenfurt (Austria). The exposition traces this journey through various mediums, including texts, graphics, video and audio material experiments, field encounters, and theoretical companions. My processes, are informed and shaped by my companion collaborators—human (research-creation companions), more-than-human, textual, and material—who co-inform and co-create the unfolding of the research.

Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies

How can groove influence ballet language to bring forth movement signature and support new meaning? I aim to uncover how groove can bridge classical form and movement signature by developing a method based on groove, revisiting ballet terminology, and allowing the performers to find their movement signature. Resilience has emerged as an accompanying concept that provides a base when generating movement. I research, create, and perform work that is anchored in Western Contemporary Dance. In my practice, I search for connections between the dancers, the concept, the music, the rehearsal process, and the performance. Questions I ask myself are: What are threads that help all involved connect to the work meaningfully? And how do we all come out of the creation with a sense of authorship? I often invite personal memories of the dancers into the work to make it more relatable, finding that commonalities emerge to connect us. The themes I base my concepts around are identity, finding a place of belonging, home, and womanhood. I have chosen to approach this research with varying lenses: my personal experience both in life and in the studio, through poetic writing, relating to thinkers and choreographers, and through the creation of Lost Threads. There is an analytical approach through depicting what in groove can serve ballet. I have based my research on music theory and transferred knowledge to an embodied practice around groove. I have analyzed the biomechanics of ballet movements, precisely 8, adding how language can contribute to another level of experiencing movement. I define resilience as the process of finding one's centre, and how the process toward equilibrium can be used to generate drive and inspiration, relating this process to choreographic scores and improvisation. The counter side of this research is the poetic approach I have taken through writing and sketching. This world offers further possibilities to uncover more knowledge on the connection of ballet and groove, performers and movement signature, resilience and improvisation. I’ve come back to my roots of ballet and gone deeper into the ground, emerging with an innovative practice through groove. Daring to search for innovative ways of bending classical form. Fontys Academy of the Arts, Codarts, Master Choreography COMMA, Master Arts, Cohort 4: 2023-2025

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2024 BA Photography My research paper, Do Androids remember they once dreamed of Electric Sheep? investigates the interplay between artificial intelligence and human cognition, focusing on the theme of "dreams" as a metaphorical and literal framework for understanding large language models (LLMs). Starting with a personal reflection on the nature of knowledge, the research probes the philosophical question of what can truly be known, using the enigmatic functionality of LLMs like ChatGPT as a focal point. It challenges traditional views by comparing the often-unpredictable outputs of LLMs to the elusive and revealing nature of dreams.